No More Questions is an Internet art piece and an installation referring to the online communication made possible by the the use of webcams, chatrooms and voice conferences. Its aim is to point out the user's reaction in front of a webcam or his behaviour inside a chat room or a voice conference.

Being in a chat room gives  the opportunity to hide behind a nickname and pretend to be someone or something else, such as changing your gender, your identity, your social ladder, your nationality and much much more... 

Cyberspace offers lots of services where individuals create an elaborate "persona" or "character" whose description is registered available to read by anyone logged on the same virtual space. Most people adopt a "nick" or nickname in various chat modes, including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and MUDs (Multi-User-Dungeons) and MOOs (the software enables individuals to create a built environment, that is, to change the software, adding, for example "rooms" to a "mansion", "furnishing" them, etc). 

A particularly shocking instance is that of a couple called "Mick" and "Sue" who met and fell in love on MUD1. Mick had been having an online relationship with Sue for about 2 years and they had been chatting and exchanging letters almost every day. One day Mick made a proposal of marriage, after which Sue suddenly disappeared. In the beginning Mick thought that Sue was just busy, then he started to worry about her. He decided to travel from the US to London and find her. Upon his arrival at Sue's house, a woman answered the door. "Sue?" She sort of looked like her. "I think you'd better come inside..".  Sue was a man who had just been jailed for defrauding the Department of Transport of £60,000. This woman was his wife. Over in London were also his two small children. For a very long stretch "Sue" was able to pass as a woman because she presented a coherent and consistent image. [1]

"babygurl4sale6969", "prince20001in", "~*~ freaky Girl ~*~", "#SWEET MALE#", "~*~*~PlAy_BoY~*~*~" (the last one is a 14 year old female according to her profile and photograph) and many more are samples of user's nicks when in a chat room. There are also sample or custom questions when entering a chat room, or starting a voice conference or a chat talk in private, such as "asl plz" (Age-Sex-Location PLeaZe), "u gurls wanna chat?", etc. or even abuse and slang towards others "you people are boring in this room...", it is  better if I don't  provide you with any more examples right here... 

We feel close to those with whom we communicate online, but are physically distanced from them through servers and wires. Contemporary communication technologies isolate the individual by preventing physical proximity to others. The homecam community, however, would say that they have generated friends through their shared experience of living online [2]. In a 1998 article, Simon Firth muses  that "Perhaps homecam fans are a new breed of flaneur, enabled by Internet technology to enter more intimate spaces and moments than their 19th Century forebears. " I believe this access to apparent intimacy marks our particular historical moment. As the media moves from paparazzi and the stalking of celebrities to "reality" television, such as Big Brother and Survivor, the Web allows us the most secret of viewing experiences -- ordinary people sleeping, taking baths, making love. [3]

In the beginning, I started capturing webcams because I was impressed by the user's reaction in front of the camera. Everybody watching the screen, moving slowly, trying hardly to communicate with others via low resolution images and sounds, users in the chatroom look like low resolution moving photographs - all on the same theme, shot in a different background each time, except for professionals performing for an audience such as Ana Voog at anacam.com. But there is one thing common to all of them: their eyes. They all try to FIND - GATHER INFORMATION - COMMUNICATE. 

During April 2004, I realized that there were the same people surfing in the chat room every day, as I saw some of them twice or three times. This fact, in addition to custom questions heard in the room became an inspiration for this website. This is to provide you with a synopsis of the atmosphere existed in the chatroom in April 2004, and present it , as different as I can each time, as it was each time different for me when I joined the room.

Visit project's page >>

[1] "TEXT AS MASK: GENDER AND IDENTITY ON THE INTERNET", Brenda Danet, Dept. of Communication & Journalism, Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology Hebrew University of Jerusalem, <http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdanet/mask.html>, 01 May 2004

[2] Melita Zajc, critic

[3] "Watch Me! Webcams and the Public Exposure of Private Lives."(Critical Essay), Art Journal, Winter, 2000, by Brooke A. Knight, <http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0425/4_59/69294346/print.jhtml>, 01 May 2004